But with "The Shape of Things," you had the problem of coming out with a play that, in a different sense, seemed to have a pretty ill-timed debut. Did you consider doing anything differently?

In rehearsals, you had to sort of close yourself off. It was a play that we were remounting; it was done previous to this. And there were occasional jokes in the script that now some of the cast would [notice], like when someone would say something about a letter bomb. But you know, this was the way it was written. And I think it was our responsibility to present this as it was. We shouldn't be catering to the current sensibility.

Did you change anything?

Wasn't changed at all. I didn't change anything.

You actually wrote a piece for the Times about what it was like for a play to come out now, and you seemed to sort of avoid really describing what your play was about.

Well, I wrote a much more volatile piece first time out, but the Times chose not to run it.

Volatile in what way?

It was a much more ... You couldn't call it self-deprecating. I guess you'd have to call it self-loathing. It sprang from a real emotional place that one writes from -- for me, for being someone who has often been deemed a clinician, who writes from a removed space. I wrote about a sort of flash point I had, where I was standing in line, four days later, in Union Station in Chicago, lugging my bags around trying to get on this train and half-hoping there was a first-class line that I could get in to, and sort of realizing, you know, that we're back to basics, everybody was just sort of fighting for space. And I had this moment of thinking, ugh, I really don't like this, it's really inconvenient what happened. It's really sad, of course. But it's rather inconvenient today.

And I didn't like that impulse, and so I gave it several pages of material. And the Times kept bumping it up the ladder, and finally they said, you know, it's probably too early for something like this.

But you must have felt that way about the play: That the tragedy was also a total inconvenience for you, and "The Shape of Things."

Of course. You think, well, that's perfect timing. But you hopefully -- and I guess it's the modern gauge, how quickly you stop yourself from saying anything after you've had the thought.

But in the piece you did write, you whitewashed your description of the play as "the petty concerns of four young college students as they search for love and meaning in their sheltered lives." Awfully whimsical for such a dark story, no?

Yeah, well not for me. I mean, people, I guess they just look to me for whimsy.

I didn't really feel like that piece was meant to promote the [play]. I tried to get the title in there as much as possible. I looked at it all rather wryly. Because, you know, the show, if anything post-9/11 could survive, it would be a play like this. Not at all because of the nature of [the play] but because of the dynamics. It was in a relatively small, 400-seat theater, it's not going to be driven by an influx of tourists to keep it going year after year with people in busloads. I thought it would work on its own reputation in New York, where my previous works have had some level of success.

But the word hasn't been as immediately positive as, say, about your last play ["Bash," starring Calista Flockhart], and some of the reviews, like Brantley's in the Times, have seemed to suffer from a touch of jingoism.

There was a bit of that, yes. And it certainly didn't stop there.

It didn't even occur to us that it wouldn't be well received. It had already been well received [in London]. And yet I think we kind of ran into something that I had heard whispers of and seen in other productions, which is that difficult trans-Atlantic move, where critics say, hold on a second, we'll tell you if something is good. They want to discover something ...

A backlash against the good press?

Sure, a certain amount of backlash to it. And yet I don't look at those reviews and think, Oh, they just don't get it, because I'm quite sure Brantley got it, but just didn't like what he got. I'm pretty generous with reviews; I tend to accept absolutely what somebody says as their opinion. You just have to believe in the material. I mean if you invest in the New York Times as the gospel, then you're going to have to take the rise or fall. But if someone else would say, Never mind, Ben Brantley's an asshole, then I'd have to kind of wipe out the review he gave to "Bash," which was really good. So to me, it's piece by piece, and the boxing gloves come off when you're done.

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